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the 'DOCKER_HOST' variable (and the fact that all SDK's seem to support it) is honestly the greatest bloody thing in the entire ecosystem.

My workflow for the past 3 years with Docker has been: set up some desktop machine somewhere, configure docker, configure ssh like normal: set DOCKER_HOST=ssh://<tailscale_ip> on my laptop.

Docker responds as if it's local, but I get absurd build/fetch speedup (since the wired connection is faster than Wifi) and it's not running inside a slow VM.

Recently I've been using colima on my Mac natively, but I keep reaching for the DOCKER_HOST option.



I assume port forwarding would be a pain in such a setup, right?


You just access everything on the docker machines IP instead of localhost. Dev servers may need an additional parameter for that, it i don’t see any big problems.


The above commenter claims they're using Tailscale, a zero-conf VPN, which negates any port forwarding issues.




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